The earth rose up and busy city was torn apart

The centre of New Zealand’s second city was bustling with the usual mix of lunch-hour shoppers, office workers and school children. Short-sleeved tourists strolled through the streets, enjoying the last of the late summer temperatures.

Then, at precisely 12.51pm, their world fell in around them.

“Things started sliding around... and then suddenly you could hear it crashing and you looked around and things were just falling everywhere,” said 66-year-old Gwen Robinson, an Australian holidaymaker who had stopped for a sandwich with her husband in a downtown cafe.

“You were being shaken backwards and forwards, side to side...everything was moving in different directions. It just kept going and going and there was glass and everything sliding everywhere, and things falling and windows breaking.”

Outside, the 6.3 magnitude earthquake which had struck just six miles away, and at a horribly shallow depth of just 5,000 metres, had transformed the familiar cityscape into a scene of utter devastation.

Multi-storey buildings collapsed, crushing those inside. Walls toppled outward onto streets below. Two passenger buses were smashed beneath piles of rubble. The city’s famous cathedral spire came crashing down into the main square, shattering into a thousand pieces.

“It was horrific,” said Nathanael Boehm, a web designer who was standing near a tram track when the quake struck. “People were covered in rubble, covered in several tons of concrete.”

Local journalist Daniel Tobin was buying his lunch. “I ran out of the shop and the building in front of me came down on top of people, and the building beside it came down on top of people, and the building the other side came down,” he said. “There were lots of people screaming.”

Haunting video footage of the immediate aftermath shows people wandering the streets in shock as the injured and the dead are pulled from the wreckage.

Some are screaming, others crying, most seem able to do little more than stand and stare at the carnage all around them where their picturesque city once stood.

A cacophony of wailing sirens and alarms provides a relentless soundtrack to the nightmare.

Meanwhile, unknown numbers of people remain trapped inside buildings after walls and ceilings collapsed as they worked.

Gary Moore was stranded with colleagues in a 12th-floor office block after the stairwell fell in.

“We watched the cathedral collapse out our window while we were holding onto the walls,” he said. “Every aftershock sends us rushing under the desks.”

The injured were rushed to overcrowded hospitals as rescue efforts began in earnest.

Luckier citizens made their way back toward their homes to see what had been left behind.

Neva Clarke, 67, and her husband picked their way through the rubble to their home on the eastern side of the city.

“Buildings had collapsed all around us,” she said. “There was dust and smoke everywhere, alarms going off. Footpaths were cracked and buckled, traffic at a standstill, people coming out of buildings and not knowing what to do or where to go.

“The couple found their neighbourhood “just devastated”.

“Homes all around us had crumbled,” Mrs Clarke said. “We got to our place and the garage had detached from the house itself, the supporting poles were leaning at an angle.

“It was too dangerous to go too far inside but everything was crushed...smashed. The piano had lost its legs, all the furniture was on its side, the windows had smashed, parts of the walls and ceiling had just fallen in.”

As night began to fall, the city was left in darkness and in shock.

Emergency camps were set up on parks and playing fields for those left homeless, rows of tents erected hastily to shelter these dispossessed from the heavy rain that had begun to fall.

It will be many months before the pain of Christchurch’s darkest day can begin to be washed away.